Venture Asheboro wants to make local businesses more appealing to major companies, one incubator at a time

Dean-Paul Stephens, The Courier-Tribune
·2 min read

A new grant fuels a local push to prepare Randolph County businesses to work with mega sites.

Totaling $100,000, the grant was awarded to Venture Asheboro by NC Idea. While the former advocates for business interest at the local level, the latter describes itself as "a private foundation committed to supporting entrepreneurial ambition and economic empowerment in North Carolina."

Formerly, Venture Asheboro secured grant funding from NC Idea to establish incubator offices.

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"We were a part of their ecosystem, their entrepreneurial ecosystem across the state," said Venture Asheboro Director Jonathan Thill. "When they posted about this new great opportunity, I immediately applied."

Thill learned that his bid was successful earlier in the week and is now preparing to expand Venture Asheboro's services to serve as a proverbial bridge between local small businesses and larger enterprises moving into the area.

"The funds are going to be for accelerating and supporting local suppliers and contractors for mega sites," Thill said. "This grant is to help local contractors and vendors bring in more of those large contracts."

This includes a wide of range of possibilities, from companies providing particular parts to a company providing landscaping services to a mega-site.

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"All of these are going to be really large contracts that our local vendors, our local employers, don't have experience bidding on," Thill said. "We've seen people come in from Raleigh, Charlotte, and out-of-state to come to our community and try to land some of these contracts."

Thill plans to partner with the Chamber for a pair of accelerator programs geared toward teaching the ins-and-outs of applying for contracts.

"How do you pitch and create proposals for these multinational corporations," Thill said, going over some of the topics the new accelerators are likely to touch on. "Pricing your services for these organizations as well."

Venture Asheboro also plans to work with the Small Business Technology and Development Center to provide instruction and technical expertise to the proposed accelerator.

Venture Asheboro is not required to pay matching funds for the grant.

This article originally appeared on The Courier-Tribune: Venture Asheboro to use grant funding for megasite readiness